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A fundamental limit to the search for the oldest fossils

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 832–834 (2022)Cite this article

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Life emerged from and amidst non-living phenomena that already possessed some of the hallmarks now used four billion years later to recognize fossil organisms. It may be next to impossible to distinguish the earliest signs of life against this background. What can we still learn from fossil-like materials on the early Earth and elsewhere?

Fossils from the Archaean eon, 4.0–2.5 billion years ago (Ga), illuminate Earth’s earliest ecosystems and help to constrain the age of the biosphere itself1,2. The search for the most ancient fossils is, however, notoriously difficult. Since the mid-nineteenth century, numerous cryptic phenomena in Precambrian rocks have been heralded as the oldest evidence of life on Earth only to be reinterpreted as abiotic shortly afterwards, often fomenting long and heated debates. A recent example is the discovery of iron-oxide tubules in 4.1–3.7-billion-year (Gy)-old hydrothermal chert from the Nuvuaggituq Greenstone Belt of northeast Canada, interpreted as the mineralized sheaths of iron-oxidizing bacteria and hence as the oldest fossil organisms3. It has now been shown that most features of these simple microstructures can be reproduced in laboratory ‘chemical gardens’, which may have natural analogues in hydrothermal systems4. Recent claims for 3.8-Gy-old stromatolites5 have likewise been called into question by three-dimensional analysis suggesting that they are deformation or alteration structures6. These debates are not resolved and similar controversies have lasted decades: carbonaceous ‘microfossils’ of Western Australia’s 3.46-Gy-old Apex chert remain controversial three decades after they were first described7,8,9.

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Fig. 1: The pseudofossil problem in relation to the earliest organisms.

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Acknowledgements

S.F.J. acknowledges support from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation (ID 100010434) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement no. 847648. The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/PI21/11830015.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UK Centre for Astrobiology, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Sean McMahon

  2. Grant Institute, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Sean McMahon

  3. Centro de Química Estrutural, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Seán F. Jordan

Authors
  1. Sean McMahon
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S.M. conceived the study. Both authors drafted and edited the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sean McMahon.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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McMahon, S., Jordan, S.F. A fundamental limit to the search for the oldest fossils. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 832–834 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01777-0

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